The Festival of Human Biodiversity Begins

During each Olympics, I get to remind everybody that my moderate theory that Nature and Nurture both matter is much more plausible than the conventional wisdom's extremist Nurture Only theory.

In Aporia, Noah Carl writes:

Are Africans better runners?

A new paper tries to debunk hereditarian claims about African running success, but its arguments aren't convincing.

JUL 24, 2024

Written by Noah Carl.

You can see why people don’t want to believe that racial IQ gaps are genetic. They’re concerned the claim could be used to justify racism. But why do people refuse to believe that racial gaps in athletic performance are genetic? …

One reason they refuse is that conceding genes contribute to racial gaps in athletic performance makes it more plausible they contribute to racial IQ gaps, and for many people that would be intolerable. …

The latest effort to disprove racial differences in athletic ability is a paper by Tade Souaiaia and colleagues titled ‘Revisiting Stereotypes: Race and Running’. Specifically, these authors challenge the “racialist paradigm” that West Africans have an inherent advantage in sprinting and East Africans have an inherent advantage in long-distance running….

Souaiaia and colleagues then present four pieces of evidence which they claim further undermine the “racialist paradigm”.

The first is “Caribbean enrichment”, the fact that Jamaica and some other Caribbean nations have achieved disproportionate success in sprinting, as compared to most countries in West Africa itself. But this simply shows that genetics isn’t the only factor that matters. …

The second piece of evidence is “African diversity”, the fact some of the best African sprinters are not from West Africa. For example, the African 100m record is held by an athlete from Kenya. Yet this is unpersuasive, since the athlete in question, Ferdinand Omanyala, is ethnically Bantu. …

The third piece of evidence is “East Asian Success”, the fact that the Chinese 100m record is faster than the West African 100m record, and there have been more Chinese athletes in the last ten 100m finals than West African athletes.

If you are referring to the men’s 100m finals going back through 1984, out of the 80 finalist slots, there have been eight west African finalists (one running for Portugal and seven representing west African countries) and four southern African finalists (Namibia and South Africa) versus that one Chinese guy who won his semifinal in 2021.

But, again, this simply shows that genetics isn’t the only relevant factor. China has 1.4 billion people and perhaps the highest state capacity of any country. …

The fourth piece of evidence is “morphological diversity”, the fact that elite sprinters are relatively diverse in terms of their biomechanics. This argument does have some truth to it. Elite sprinters certainly seem more diverse in this respect than, say, elite long-distance runners. Usain Bolt is 1.95m tall, whereas Su Bingtian is only 1.72m. … Yet it remains true that sprinting is overwhelmingly dominated by athletes with West/South African ancestry. And rather than having one single trait or gene, these athletes likely have a combination of traits that give them an edge over their competitors….

Another point worth making is that some ethnic groups are dramatically underrepresented in elite sprinting, even compared to Europeans and East Asians. Not a single athlete from South Asia appears in the top 3,949 men’s 100m times, despite this region comprising almost 25% of the world’s population.2 By comparison, there are 772 entries for Jamaica alone – a country that makes up less than 0.04% of the world’s population.

I’m happy to say that there is now a South Asian who has run 100 meters in under 10 seconds. In 2022 Yupun Abeykoon of Sri Lanka ran 9.96 in the 100 meters, which is tied for the 735th fastest time ever, making him tied for the 124th fastest individual ever. He benefited from a +1.6 tailwind and 1000 meters of moderate altitude in the Jura Mountains of Switzerland, but those aren't huge advantages. (Most sub-10.00 times benefit from slightly favorable conditions.)

South Asia has a few sub-Saharans brought in by the slave trade and the like. (The young Barack Obama once met a black field worker laboring at Obama’s Pakistani friend’s family fort.) So I checked out pictures, especially of Abeykoon’s hair:

He looks like a pretty typical South Asian guy (in the way that Shohei Ohtani looks like a typical Japanese salaryman or Clark Kent looks like a typical mild-mannered reporter).

My guess is that in some hard to define absolute sense, Europeans tend to be pretty good at all distances, but West Africans are extremely good at 400m and shorter and East Africans at 3000m and longer, which leaves 800m and 1500m as the most diversely competitive events.

This is not to say that Nurture doesn’t matter. For instance, I’d imagine there's a definite impact of Stereotype Threat on white American runners who come to the end of a fine college track career and think about whether they should go pro and focus on making the Olympics. Say, you aren’t ready to make next year’s Olympics, but during the subsequent Olympics in five years you’ll be peaking at age 27. Or you could give up your track dreams and go to law school now and get on with your life.

If you are an 800m or 1500m man, maybe you stick with running as your job.

But if you are a white sprinter, c'mon, be realistic...

So, Stereotype Threat probably does exist in the real world: e.g., I suspect a fair number of white high school and college football cornerbacks have decided to play the odds and shift to safety, some (although probably not many) could have made it as cornerbacks.

Like I said, both Nature and Nurture tend to be influential in human affairs.